


Things that happened on Jakku

by MabelLover



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: First Star Wars fic, Gen, Rey Palpatine, didn't like it but tried to work with it, how do you tag, rey's childhood on jakku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22292269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MabelLover/pseuds/MabelLover
Summary: Or, Rey is left on a barren planet and grows up.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey (Star Wars) & Original Character(s), Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Things that happened on Jakku

He’s after them. Kira knew that the possibility was real, that he could have found a way to come back from the dead, to torment the galaxy once more. She didn’t, however, think that her family would be targeted – he never manifested interest in her husband and his lack of Force-sensitiveness when he still was in power. But her daughter, her little light, shines so bright that even someone like Kira can feel her systems away. She taught her to hide her presence in the Force, to put a tap on her powers, and hopes that it is enough to fool him when they give themselves up to keep Rey safe.

 _She’s dead_ , they’ll tell him, and their corpses will guard the secret of the little scavenger on Jakku.

But Rey doesn’t want them to leave, she cries and screams, and Kira puts up a cold front and pretends to be a junk trader that is willing to sell her child for drinking money. She reaches out to her daughter and takes her memories of them, locking them away in a hidden compartment and laying sand on top of it to create dunes like the ones of Jakku. All she’ll ever know is the barren planet and Rey, and she will forget Breha.

\----

Rey is little, only five years old, and she finds an old helmet that belonged to a Rebel fighter. She can’t read Aurebesh yet, so she asks the scavenger who let her live with her, Dormé, what it says on the side. Dormé holds it, squinting to see the faded markings, and tells her that it belonged to some ‘Raeh’. They laugh at the similarity of the names, Rey, Raeh, and Dormé says that one day she could be a pilot and travel all around the galaxy. She talks about the planets Rey and her could visit, Endor, Coruscant, maybe even Naboo, Dormé’s mother came from Naboo, and they look at the stars that peek from the entrance of their improvised base.

Rey says that she has a family that will come back one day, and Dormé frowns but doesn’t answer. _No one comes back to Jakku_ , is the unspoken thought, _much less someone who sold their daughter._

\----

Sometimes, Rey likes to imagine a friend. He would be tall, she thinks, and would have a mop of dark hair like she thinks her father had, and a pretty smile like Dormé. She dreams of adventures with him, of piloting the ship that Unkar Plutt now has on Niima Outpost, of watching him writing on pretty paper, of just sitting down in a meadow and seeing more life in those few minutes than she ever did in her entire life.

Sometimes, Rey wishes that her parents were back and that Dormé would come with them and travel far away from Jakku and the sun and the sand and it’s that thought that keeps her coming back every day to write another tally on the wall, another day that passed, so that she will never forget that she is waiting for someone.

Sometimes, Rey sees how Dormé is thinner than usual, how her face became more pale and gaunt and how she wobbles while she walks, and she works extra hard to bring more food to the base and make sure that Dormé will sleep with a fuller belly.

Sometimes, Rey sleeps with the dolly she made and wakes up to find herself longing for something. She never knows what it is.

\----

Dormé falls asleep one night and doesn’t wake up the next morning. Rey is nine and digs a grave to put her in. There is a sandstorm two weeks later and she will never find the markers that she used.

Rey finds an AT-AT and makes her home there.

\----

Rey is twelve and she stops dreaming about her friend. She’s old enough to stop having imaginary friends anyways, she thinks, and moves on with the day. She takes off to the Star Destroyer she’s been scavenging on her speeder and adjusts the face wrap.

She searches through the sea of metal and sand, picking up a compressor here, a few components there, until she reaches a room that clearly used to be someone’s quarters. There is the frame of a bed, the mattress long taken by some other scavenger, some shelves, a door to a useless ‘fresher. On the desk there is a broken datapad that has something written about a Princess Leia and the picture that comes with it seems familiar, but when Rey grabs it, trying to see it better, it falls apart on her hands.

At night, back at home, she makes another tally on the wall and wonders why it seems that everything has changed.

\----

The old women of Jakku are, like every other scavenger, ruthlessly possessive and self-interested, but they all help the younger girls deal with their first period without asking for anything in exchange. That is what brings Onna, the oldest woman of Niima Outpost at the age of 32, to teach Rey how to wrap cloth to avoid getting blood on her clothes, how to predict when it will come, how to deal with the pains. She also teaches the fourteen-year-old the mechanics of love and Rey leaves her tent with the wisdom that only the fairer sex can have.

\----

When Rey thinks of her past, she can’t see the time before Jakku. There is Dormé and Niima Outpost and, if she looks really back, she can see her first night as a scavenger, but she can’t remember more. She looks at the night sky and the stars call out to her, the constellations that Dormé and her had named so long ago, Amidala for a queen, Raeh for a pilot, Mama and Papa together, hugging, Ben for the boy that she used to dream of.

Rey makes another tally on the wall and waits another day for someone who is coming back for her.

\----

Sometimes, Rey dreams of an island. There is water everywhere she looks, the wind is cold, not like the cold of Jakku’s nights but a wetter cold, and she smells salt and seaweed. There are paths in the ground, diverging into many different staircases, and she wanders around, aimlessly. She finds a group of huts made of the same stone and inside a man that never sees her, or she finds a big hollow tree that reeks of ancient the same way she reeks of loneliness. After looking around, Rey hears a call but wakes up before she can answer it.

Sometimes, Rey dreams of sand and a big hand dragging her while she screams at a ship, and a woman with dark hair hugs her and calls her little light and a man smiles and tells her to _go play, Breha_. Rey never remembers these dreams.

Sometimes, Rey dreams of a man with dark, pleading eyes and a scarred face who extends his hand to her and asks, no, begs her to join him, and Rey wants to, she wants to take his hand, but she can’t, and she reaches her arm and _pulls_ and something breaks and she is thrown back. She always wakes up regretting it.

\----

Rey is nineteen and she writes another tally on the wall. Tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll go back to the Star Destroyer and find some of those parts that Plutt was giving a portion for.

On the night sky, the constellation that she named Ben seems to shine brighter.


End file.
